1. Franklin Furnace and the students of P.S. 20 at 80 Arts, Brooklyn, opening Dec. 16

Martha Wilson, Founding Director of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. and Sean Keaton, Principal of P.S. 20, invite you to an exhibition of photographs of children in Ms. Apton’s fifth grade class, and a launch party for the website designed by the children in Ms. Parker-Marshall’s fifth grade class, the culmination of Franklin Furnace’s fall, 2008 Sequential Art for Kids workshops. The opening will take place on Tuesday, December 16, 2008, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm, in the lobby of 80 Arts—The James E. Davis Arts Building. Doug Beube, assisted by Kangying Guo, was the teaching artist for the photography workshop, and Louise Diedrich, assisted by Eben Shapiro, was the teaching artist for the website design workshop.

Franklin Furnace acknowledges with grateful thanks the 2008 supporters of its Sequential Art for Kids program: The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, The Bay and Paul Foundations, The Cowles Charitable Trust, Independence Community Foundation, JPMorgan Chase Foundation, and The New York Times Company Foundation. Thanks to the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership for use of the lobby.

Diane will perform her signature performance, DRAG KINGS AND
SUBJECTS, on December 13 at 20,00 in the Feministal Dia Festival de
Cultura Feminista at Arteleku, San Sebastian, Spain.
More info from:www.feministaldia.net

THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY (TNC), Crystal Field, Executive Artistic Director, is proud to present the premiere of Award-winning Playwright Bina Sharif's newest play, HERE COMES THE CHANGE, playing at Theater for the New City, 155 1st Avenue (bet 9th and 10th Street), from December 18th, 2008 through January 4th, 2009.
Bina Sharif's Hilarious and Timely new play, HERE COMES THE CHANGE, is a satirical look back at the recent Presidential Election. We are taken on a whimsical journey to the Presidential debate, where Senator McCain appears more worried about losing his own house than winning the White House. His opponent, cool, collected Senator Obama, calls for both social and economic change, in an effort to win over his most ardent opponents. In the audience, poor Joe the Plumber tries to make himself heard. But will anyone listen? Meanwhile, Sarah Palin talks and talks and talks...but can anybody figure out what she's saying?! TV Hosts and Political Pundits argue amongst themselves. Election night comes and is met with all the fervor of the Kentucky Derby. And, of course, we all know who wins!

The play features Raul Jennings as Senator Joe Biden, Bina Sharif as the Moderator, Omar Robinson as Senator (now President-Elect) Barack Obama, Oliver Thrun as Joe the Plumber, Sonia Torres as Governor Sarah Palin, Jonathan Weber as Senator John McCain and Kevin Mitchell Martin as President Bush. Lighting Design is by Alexander Bartenieff.

BINA SHARIF is an award winning playwright, actress and director. HERE COMES THE CHANGE is her 25th play. Her plays have been produced in the USA, Germany, Pakistan, Switzerland, Scotland, Brazil and England. Her one-woman play, AFGHAN WOMEN, a response to the events of 9/11, was produced by TNC in 2002 and was highly acclaimed, and then toured the USA (including Hawaii), Pakistan and Manchester, England. The play was hailed "most beautiful piece of Theater," "unforgettably haunting," "brilliantly acted," and "superb writing with wit, humor, grief, joy and terror." Originally from Islamabad, Pakistan, Bina currently resides in New York City. TNC has produced 18 of her plays, including the highly acclaimed productions of MY ANCESTOR'S HOUSE, DEMOCRACY IN ISLAM, and ACCUSATION. The Playground in London has produced workshops of LOVE IS A STRANGER IN A WINDOWLESS ROOM, and 1000 HOURS OF LOVE (about the British Raj). Mabou Mines commissioned her to write and act in a one-woman play, SLEEPING WITH HORSES. She received a Joseph Jefferson Award nomination for Acting at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. She is a recipient of NYSCA, Jerome Foundation and Franklin Furnace grants.

The play runs from Thursday, December 18th through Sunday, January 4th. Performance times are Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8pm, and Sunday Matinees at 3pm. Please note that there will be no performances on Thursday, December 25th, or Thursday, January 1st. Tickets are $10.00. Reservations can be made by phone at (212) 254-1109. Tickets can be purchased online through Theater for the New City's website, http://www.theaterforthenewcity.net.

Franc is included in a group show at the Museum of Neon Art , entitled,"Traveling Light".
He is exhibiting three works from his illuminated suitcase light boxes series. The museum is located at 136 W. 4th St. Los Angeles, CA. 213-489-9918. www.neonmona.org. Dates are Nov. 15, 2008 - Mar.
15, 2009. Thursday - Sun - 12-5pm.

"Palaia's surreal photo-sculptures of suitcases and color images of travel cross boundaries and chart new territory. He has a
distinctive, individual voice, his work looks like no one else's.
He's developed a vocabulary for what he's thinking about". Alison Nordstrom, Curator of Photographs at the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY. Poughkeepsie Journal, NY, June 2007.

I am presenting a performance video piece called "Coney Island Moves" at vBrooklyn
http:/www.vBrooklyn.org on Saturday December 13th at 3:00 P. M. This is their press release.. you don't have to include all .. just basics and link.
Thanks,
Phyllis Bulkin Lehrer

vBrooklyn -- A video festival about Brooklyn as a place and video as an art form

vBrooklyn documents the evolving state of Brooklyn, NY, through contemporary video-art. The festival showcases video-artists as they build an historical record of the borough through innovative, entertaining and personal interpretation and documentation.

The festival features IDMI's 9-channel video system. Over 25 New York City artists will present live and composed multichannel video-performances and screenings focusing on the immense complexity and detail that make Brooklyn a unique city within a city. vBrooklyn subjects include Brooklyn's waterfront from Floyd Bennett Field to Greenpoint; landmark bridges and architecture; neighborhoods in transition; and the people and experiences that define Brooklyn as a place.

vBrooklyn will present a special performance by and discussion with IDMI artists and Harvestworks artist Sean Haggerty.

vBrooklyn is supported by: Forward Motion Theater, Polytechnic University's Integrated Digital Media Institute (IDMI), Harvestworks, the Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Experimental Television Center. The Experimental Television Center's Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and mediaThe Foundation.

The Van Brunt Gallery is inaugurating its new space at 137 Main St. Beacon, N.Y. with a group show of gallery artists including Norm Magnusson who will be debuting work from his new series "Decorating Nature." Examples of this work can be seen on his blog http://decoratingnature.blogspot.com/ His other work can be seen on his website www.funism.com.

The international performance project re.act.feminism provides an exemplary overview of gender-critical performance art of the 1960s and 1970s and its current ‘return’ in form of appropriations, re-enactments and archival or documentary projects.

The exhibition documents performative works from 24 artists spanning across two generations. The selected works extend the perspective beyond the canon of the known and familiar in order to demonstrate the diversity and complexity of (feminist) performative strategies. This includes performance movements in Eastern and South Eastern Europe as well as the former GDR (since the beginning of the 1980s), which often developed parallel to and independent of “Western art”.

The video archive offers visitors the possibility to choose from a wealth of more than 70 performance documents, video performances and interviews with artists and to view these “on demand”. This unique collection allows an intensive examination of feminist inspired performance art in both the East and West.

A performance programme by artists of different generations, performance interviews, discussions and theoretical reflections not only pursues the question of how performance can be archived, documented and re-enacted, but also introduces current strategies of gender-critical and interventionist performance.

I will be playing with Tom Chiu at the Roulette next Friday, at 8:30. I'll be on my vintage G3 laptop mixing/playing the composition "Viva" with Onadime software and the LumenTar and Tom is on the mean Violin. We're the first set and then Tom will be joined by David First and Michael Schumacker. Come join us if you are in town!

Please join me and editor/historian Paul Buhle for a talk about our graphic histories of radical Americans.
There will be a slide show from my “Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography,” and an exhibit of drawings from Paul’s “Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History.”
Special guests bridge history and now: Activists from today’s revived SDS, and Lori Belilove: Duncan dance authority, performer and teacher.
Hoping to see you,
Sabrina

People "Weekly," the inaugural exhibition of the CUNY Graduate Center's Amie and Tony James Gallery, is a sequential group show comprising six specially commissioned artist projects and a small "exhibition-within-the exhibition" curated by gallery director, Linda Norden.

Daniel Joseph Martinez's new project for the James Gallery, the west bank is missing, i am not dead, am i, is the product of years of meditation on the utopian aspirations of Modernist architecture and the political after-effects so many of the most ambitious Modernist developments have on current communities and everyday life. The artist's focus is the little-known relationship between a planned suburban community in Irvine, California, and the settlement housing conceived by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for Israel's West Bank initiative. Sharon was a practicing architect before he was elected Prime Minister and that fact, along with his professed interest in the Irvine tract-homes and the more celebrated Case Study housing that inspired these, serve as source for Martinez's sculptural, topological allegory. Martinez was also inspired by the expansive window exposure of the James Gallery and, more specifically, by the graded sidewalk outside, which imposes an upward or downward procession as one walks along the building's façade and looks in and down on the gallery interior.

Martinez magnifies the uncanny but deliberate similarities in the architecture of these distant communities. Using clear vacuform to create scale-model reliefs of the respective housing blocks, he embeds these into two circular cast-aluminum tracks, transforming the models into spectacular abstract sculpture.

The resulting plastic-fantastic sculptural tracks are as scary as they are beautiful. They remind us at once that the forms inspired by Modernism's utopian values and vision retain an aura of possibility, and that the deferred future so integral to Modernism's promise has arrived. The spaceship has landed, the bombs have gone off, the market is crashing. And we are not dead, are we.

January 17 – January 31, 2009
Thomas Torres Cordova, Everybody Loves the Sunshine, 2007; I wish you could color correct my films for the rest of my life, 2007
(Reception and performance by the artist, January 21, 6-8PM)

Daniel Joseph Martinez, the west bank is missing, i am not dead, am i, 2008
December 11 – January 4, 2009
(Reception, December 10, 6-8PM)

Thomas Torres Cordova, Everybody Loves the Sunshine, 2007; I wish you could color correct my films for the rest of my life, 2007
January 17 – January 31, 2009
(Reception and a performance by the artist January 21, 6-8PM)

A reading of SPECIAL OPERATIONS, a play by Jeff McMahon
reading directed by Don Boughton
Monday, December 15 at 7:30pm at Son of Semele Ensemble
3301 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90004 (213) 351-3507www.sonofsemele.org
Jeff McMahon www.jeffmcmahonprojects.net

International performance artistst will perform in the exhibition space
of the "Diana and Actaeon - The Forbidden Glimpse of the Naked Body".
With Miki Malör (A), Linda Molenaar (NL), Pamela Sneed (USA), Manuela
Rastaldi (I/CH), Annie Sprinkle (USA), Elizabeth Stephens (USA) and the
film "Secret Museums" by Peter Woditsch (D) and a video installation by
Franziska Megert (D).

Prostitute/porn star turned sex guru/performance artist, Annie Sprinkle
is coming to Duesseldorf! Annie has devoted the past 35 years to
passionately researching and exploring sexuality, from the sacred to the
profane. She has documented and shared her findings through explicit
films, photography, and sexuality workshops. For the past decade she has
toured her controversial one-woman theatre shows internationally to
great acclaim. Annie will show two of her most famous performance
acts, the "Bosom Ballet" and "Public Cervix Announcement Redux",
assisted by her collaborator multimedia artist Elizabeth Stephens, who
works in performance, sculpture, web based media and photography.
Together they are The Love Art Laboratory and show the performance "Nude
Kiss" and Elizabeth's performance piece "Spoon".

Sara Baartman aka the Venus Hottentot remains throughout history a
living reminder of mans inhumanity, cruelty, racism and crimes against
women. Taken from her homeland and exploited as a circus freak in
Europe, Baartman's experience continues to offer us history lessons. In
this performance African American performer and writer Pamela Sneed
explores issues of race, gender,violence, captivity, dignity, identity
and home.

//Box office tickets: 15,- EUR (including exhibition ticket)
Only persons 16 years old and over are permitted to attend the event.